Frontier technologies carry a promise to accelerate the sustainable development goals through supporting innovative, forwarding-looking policies and solutions. However, numerous risks and complexities of digital technologies come along with those opportunities, such as the widening digital divides, policy and regulatory challenges.
In recent years, relatively new approaches to policy experimentation and regulatory sandboxes have emerged among countries and have proven effective. This way, in partnerships with relevant stakeholders, governments can experiment and trial digital technologies and innovations at the edge or outside the existing policy space and regulatory framework.
In this context, on 13th June 2022, Monday, a virtual workshop jointly organized by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), UN ESCAP the Commerce Ministry, and a2i the ICT Division of the Bangladesh government.
In it, representatives focused on identifying policy gaps and regulatory pitfalls and formulating the corresponding elements and processes required for preparing and setting up a policy experiment framework or a regulatory sandbox. Therefore, cottage, small and medium enterprises can be facilitated with more effective access to markets, finance, skills, and services solutions besides leveraging existing ones in the reality of the fourth industrial revolution.